The puddle girls

 So, what do you guys think about this?

I didn't hardly know her then, her family had just moved into the neighborhood. Mrs. Becker had introduced her into my second grade class maybe a week previous.  She had just stepped out from behind that old wooden fence tugging her little sister behind her, "Hey Sarah," she called out, I was surprised she knew my name, later I would learn she was good at that stuff, "There's a lake out here."

A lake, I thought, hardly likely in Kaufman's prairie, it was a vacant lot, we called them prairies in those days, but she had that way about her, when she called you, you followed, and so I did, and when I came through the hole in the fence it was just a big puddle.

"That's no lake," I said, because I was a smart girl.

"No," she said, "It's not, it's a sea.  It's the deep blue sea."

Which it wasn't either, but just as she said it, it seemed, the sun broke out of the clouds, it had been raining all day, that's why there was a puddle, but now it was blue under the sky and it looked deep.

"Come," she said, "We must walk into the deep blue sea."

I didn't want to do it.  I was wearing my new shoes, and I was wearing my Easter dress too, which had looked so good when my mother had put me into it and patted down the part with the shiny buttons and given me a little shove out the door towards the church.  But when I started out down 18th Street and saw the other people walking towards the church in their Easter clothes compared to them it didn't look so good at all, and I ducked into the alleyway and ended up by that old wooden fence that ran along Kaufman's prairie.

"I don't know," I said.

"Oh come on," she said, and went to take my hand.

I shrugged her off.  She shrugged and stepped right into the puddle, dragging her little sister behind her.

She didn't look back, but I knew she knew I would follow her, and I did, and the mud sloshed into my new shoes, but looking up a bit from my shoes, it was blue, it was the deep blue sea, just like she said it was.  She had that way about her.

"We are," she said, "We are pirates."

Her sister clutching her sleeve in one hand and holding a mud-specked sky-blue Easter egg in the other, piped up, "Pirates."

"Pirates," she affirmed, "Pirates in pretty dresses."

"Pirates in pretty dresses on Easter morn, our ship wrecked on a rocky shore by the storm-tossed waters, stepping out into the sky-blue sea."  Where had I gotten that from?  Probably from some poem Mrs Becker had made us memorize.

She looked back at me and smiled.  I knew that we would be friends forever.

She sang the loudest at assemblies, not the best, but not bad, and while the rest of us were standing stiff as rods, she was moving. Her shoulders were bobbing up and down and her feet were tapping. At practice in the classroom Mrs. Becker had looked at her with her finger in front of her lips.  "Not so loud, Julia" she had told her, and Julia hushed, but just a little, and come the assembly she sang even louder than in practice, and our class got the biggest applause.  While the rest of us were standing ramrod straight I saw her take a little bow.

I was proud to do her homework.

 I was the smart one, she was the pretty one, that made us about equal, but then in sixth grade she developed and the boys became interested in her and she didn't mind that at all. 

She didn't care about homework anymore, and she didn't care much if I did her homework or not so I stopped doing it.  Workmen arrived behind the wooden fence and by the time they tore it down Kaufman's prairie was gone and there stood one of those new Walgreens drug stores.  Our daddies lined up for prescription whiskey where we had stepped into the deep blue sea, the pirates in pretty dresses were done.

She had the boys and I had school.  I was the valedictorian which meant that I got to give a speech at graduation.  I was a little daring about it, I called it Pirates in Pretty Dresses which was a little racy for the time, but I made it about stepping into the deep sky blue sea of higher education into a radiant future.  I kept the line, because I still remembered it, about the shipwreck on the rocky shore of the storm-tossed sea, even though it didn't really fit, and when I said it, I looked across the auditorium to where she was sitting, but she was banging knees with tall Steve Hogan, and not paying any attention at all.

I hardly saw her at all in high school. I was in the Scholarship Club, the Poetry Club, and I was on the Student Council.  The student council was supposed to select the senior class play.  I wanted to do something progressive, something about Emma Goldman or the Haymarket Riot.  I made a fiery speech about it, and when I was done the rest of the student council looked at me blankly and chose some cheesy play with a lot of singing and dancing, I don't remember what it was. 

But Julia was in it.  Nobody quite approved of her, but she could sing and she could dance, and more than that, she held the stage.  When she was off the stage the audience fidgeted, when she came back on they were rapt. 

When they came out to take their bows, the principal had the student council take the stage behind them, because I guess that we had selected the play, and maybe because they thought we were good examples for the rest of the class.  Amid the applause she stepped back to me, took my hand, raised it up and then down to join with the actors in the bow, and then she looked at me in that way she had, but I just looked away.

Her grades were lousy, she didn't even graduate, and I went on to the University of Illinois, a proud example of a girl from a hardscrabble neighborhood who had advanced herself.

I studied hard, I wrote poetry, I wrote scholarly papers, I almost never thought of Julia, and the next thing I knew she was in the movies.